It’s with regret that I hear of the passing of Ed Griffin, Canadian writer, champion of prison reform, and mentor to many, who taught creative writing at a number of Canadian prisons, until his progressive views on the rehabilitation of prisoners saw him barred from giving any more of the classes that had meant a lot to many inmates.

Ed was no stranger to controversy. He was active in the civil rights movement of the ‘60s, and marched in Selma with Martin Luther King. He became a Roman Catholic priest in 1962, but left the priesthood in 1968. In 1976, he opened a commercial greenhouse in suburban Milwaukee with his wife Kathy, raising children and growing flowers. In 1988 the family moved to British Columbia, where he helped to establish a writing community in Surrey. He is the founder of Western Canada’s largest writer’s conference, the Surrey Writers’ Conference.

I met Ed during my early forays online in 2012. He turned out to be a good friend, writing reviews for my animal novel MagnifiCat,http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H0ORWQY and for a number of the short stories I formatted and put on the web, http://www.amazon.com/Danielle-de-Valera/e/B00H286LXI Quick with an encouraging word, and never one to complain, he told us of his diagnosis of prostate cancer about a year ago. Gradually his posts at Writers Write Daily, https://writerswritedaily.wordpress.com/ and Prison Uncensored, https://prisonuncensored.wordpress.com/ slowed to a trickle and finally stopped. When I emailed him one time to ask how he was, he replied cheerfully, saying the medication he was now on made him lethargic and it was difficult for him to write posts. About a week ago, I woke up one night thinking about him and rose to find an email in my Inbox, telling me of his passing.

As part of his championing of those in prison, through the John Howard Society, a humanitarian organization, http://www.johnhowardbc.ca/ Ed started a little bursary called the Ed Griffin Educational Bursary This bursary, to which anyone can contribute, aims to help inmates with the expenses of higher education. Those contributing receive a tax receipt from the John Howard Society, who present money to the educational institution the winning inmate has chosen. Anyone wishing to honour his memory in a concrete way might consider donating at: http://www.edgriffin.net/bursary.html

A few days ago I was surprised to receive an email from Carol Middleton, an Australian award-winning writer, and a reviewer for the prestigious Australian Book Review. In the email Carol invited me to join the Writing Process Blog Tour, in which writers are invited to reply to four questions about their writing process and then pass the baton on to another writer/s.

Many thanks to Carol for inviting me to contribute to this tour, which in its construction is like a chain letter but nice. You can see Carol’s Writing-Process Blog published Monday 12th at http://carolmiddleton.com.au/wordpress

Here goes.

What am I working on?

Having put my first novel out on Amazon and Smashwords last year, I decided to try to get myself a bigger presence on the web by putting up a short story a month in 2014. Being the digital klutz that I am, it took me three months to learn enough to put up my first story Busting God, now available at: www.amazon.com/dp/B00J8ZIE8S. I’m now working on formatting my second story Remains to be Seen, which follows the fortunes of Busting God’s hero as he tries to recover from the post-traumatic stress caused by his participation in the Vietnam War.

I’m a tortoise, very slow at everything I do, and not very comfortable on the web. However, I’ve decided that having a higher profile there will help my novels eventually, so I’m nailed to the cross of formatting these twelve short stories for the remainder of 2014.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

How to answer this question? My short stories were published in such diverse places, ranging from Penthouse to Aurealis to the Australian Women’s Weekly. Each time I adapted my basic writing style to suit the market — I was a single parent and I needed the money. My only novel published so far is MagnifiCat: www.amazon.com/dp/B00H0ORWQY — a strange little animal fantasy about a family of cats who find themselves on the poverty line in a small country town in New South Wales, Australia. In it I aimed to produce a kind of Wind in the Willows for adults. To what extent I succeeded is hard to gauge. The novel’s definitely not satire; it’s more like a fairy tale for adults, with an underlying heavy core that makes it adult fiction, though I plan to release a children’s version of it in 2015, minus the alcohol and the angst.

Why do I write what I do?

In my case there are two answers to this. The short stories were written either for money — publication or competition money — or to add to my literary CV. In the novels, however, I get to please myself. And I notice that what comes though in all of them (I have another four in various stage of development) is a desire to nail down a particular time and place that’s now long gone. You could say I’m obsessed with transience, and writing about these places is my way of trying to keep them alive in people’s memories after they’ve disappeared under the bulldozer of progress. My Queensland novel is set in Brisbane in the early 1960s; MagnifiCat is set in Byron Shire in the mid-1980s, and somewhere in the dim future, should I live that long, I’d like to write a novel set in Brisbane during WWII. It’s as if I’m saying to readers, Remember how it was. Don’t forget this.

How does my writing process work?

I write first draft material in the morning, while I still have some contact with my unconscious. Editing, a completely different process requiring a different part of the brain, I can do any time. I never work after dark unless I have an editing job or a manuscript appraisal for another writer and the deadline is looming.

To me, producing first-draft material is like digging semi-precious stones out of the ground, while editing is like polishing those stones into something people might find beautiful or useful. Basically, I want my writing to entertain, to make people happy. At the risk of sounding overly ambitious (or merely quaint), I’d like it to give people hope. Life can be tough sometimes.

The writer I’ve asked to continue the Writing Process Blog Tour on Monday 26th is Ed Griffin, a Canadian novelist and prison reformer. Ed taught creative writing in prisons for many years. He blogs at: